Creating Space: Why I Started Taking Fridays Off
Creating space in your life doesn't need a plan behind it. I started with one Friday off this summer and here's what that space has taught me so far.
This summer, I made a decision. I was going to create more space in my life and business.
What I wanted was thinking space. Time to explore and simply be, without a project attached to either.
Last summer went into building my Substack, and I recently celebrated one year of it.
This summer, I wanted something different.
The idea landed as Fridays off. I’d tested a version of this years ago, back when I was still in my corporate job, carving out a day here and there to breathe. Doing it as a Substack coach and small business owner felt like a different kind of risk entirely.
At first, I doubted it would work. I looked at other creators around me, building courses, launching the next thing, always visibly in motion, and wondered how I was supposed to take a day off while they kept building. I decided to test it anyway.
On my first Friday off, I picked up the book Manifest. It felt like the right book at the right moment, almost too well timed to be coincidence. It helped me see the fear sitting underneath my hesitation, the quiet worry that stepping back meant falling behind. It also confirmed something I already suspected. Creating space has far more to do with mindset than with any specific ritual or ideal Friday. I could show up to that day differently each week and still be doing it right.
From there, the space started evolving. It began as a solo day out, just me and no agenda. It turned into something else entirely soon after, a quiet celebration of one year on Substack, sitting with everything that year had actually built. Somewhere in there, it gave me room to slow down properly, in a way I hadn’t let myself do in a while. This month, it’s still finding its shape.
There’s no strict agenda for what a Friday holds. What I can say is that this space is primarily a thinking space and rarely a creative one. I’m not writing in the usual sense, not drafting content or building the next offer. When you run a small business, the pull is always toward creating. Making the next thing. Building whatever comes after the thing you just built.
Let's observe how others are creating that same space, in their own way.
The gap before the change
Justin Welsh built one of the most visible one-person businesses on the internet, then started a Substack called Unsubscribe, a newsletter for people stepping off the default path. That publication is now called the saturday essay. The name changed. What changed underneath it is more interesting. His recent essays read less like a solopreneur playbook and more like a person thinking out loud about the parts of life that don’t come with a template. A different kind of writing from the one that made him well known in the first place, and he wrote it without asking anyone’s permission.
Jenna Kutcher’s version of this looked different, and it might be the more instructive one for anyone building slowly.
At the end of 2025, after 968 episodes and almost a decade of The Goal Digger Podcast, she paused it. Her own words were that she was pausing a thriving, seven-figure show while it was still running beautifully, specifically to prove that a woman can choose to step back at the height of something instead of waiting for it to force her hand. Disappearing was never the plan. She started writing on Substack instead, and the surprising part is what she chose to build there. She could have launched the next big thing. Instead, she chose a slower pace, sharing only when she actually had something to say.
I wrote here, how we’ve connected with Jenna.
The pattern underneath both
Read those two stories side by side and a pattern shows up. Neither of them changed direction because something broke. They changed direction because they noticed a gap opening between the business they’d built and the person they were becoming, and they trusted that gap enough to act on it before it turned into resentment.
That’s the part I want you to take from this, more than the specifics of what either of them did next.
In slow business, this matters more than it does anywhere else, because the entire model depends on your work staying connected to something true in you. Hustle-driven business can run on momentum alone for a while. Slow business asks for more than that. The moment the thing you’re building stops matching who you’re becoming, the whole structure starts to feel hollow, even while the metrics look fine.
What this asks of you
If you’re feeling that gap right now, here’s what I’d offer instead of a strategy.
Notice what you’re actually building room for. Most people treat a pivot like a demolition, when it’s closer to reallocating attention. The audience, the offer, the identity you’ve built can all stay standing. One part is allowed to quiet down so another part has space to grow, the way Jenna kept her list running while the podcast paused, or the way Justin kept the audience he’d built while the writing underneath it changed shape.
Own the platform that isn’t someone else’s algorithm. Both of these examples point back to the same infrastructure decision, an email list and a website that belong to them, regardless of what any single platform decides to do next. A business that lives entirely inside someone else’s feed makes changing direction feel a lot riskier than it needs to. A business that lives on something you own turns that same change into an update.
Stop waiting for the version of this decision that feels obviously right. It rarely does, at first. Jenna described the choice to pause as one that could look wrong on paper while feeling right in her body. That’s usually how these decisions arrive, quiet and slightly inconvenient, long before they’re loud and validated by results.
As a Substack coach, most days I’ll point you toward your next content strategy, your next subscriber goal, your next launch. This isn’t one of those days.
This one is an invitation to slow down enough to actually hear what you’re building toward, instead of what you think you’re supposed to keep building. When you give yourself that space, the right people tend to find you faster than any strategy would have gotten them there. Your positioning gets clearer, and it happens because you stopped forcing a version of your business that never quite fit, rather than because you worked harder at it.
Growth doesn’t always come from adding more. Sometimes it comes from finally having enough quiet to hear what’s next.
Dimi| Marketing Strategist and Substack coach| Helping writers and creatives build newsletters with a clear identity and a brand that works